Environmental Policy

“KYOCERA has been banging the ecological drum since Sting was knee-high to a South American grasshopper” said IT journalist Tim Danton back in 2002. In fact, we launched our first ECOSYS printer back in 1992 – the year of the first Earth Summit in Rio - and have been refining and improving the environmental performance of our products ever since.

In addition, we are committed to reducing the environmental impact of both our own business operations and those of our supply chain and channel partner community. We aim to continuously improve our environmental performance and adopt a leadership role in our industry towards promoting more environmentally responsible and resource efficient business. You can find details of our environmental policy in the download bar to the right.

KYOCERA Document Solutions (UK) operates an environmental management system that complies with ISO14001. We continuously strive to reduce the environmental impact of our offices through both behaviour change and the application of technology. In addition, when we moved our Reading HQ to new premises in August 2013, we had the opportunity to ensure that our new building achieved the highest standards of energy efficiency and sustainable materials.

In pursuit of this aim, we choose a refurbishment contractor that had a strong track record in creating workplaces that accurately reflect both the company culture and the sustainability goals of its clients and are ambitious in terms of their resource and energy use. Area Sq, part of the Fourfront Group, won the contract and were briefed to deliver an aspirational workplace with ambitious energy efficiency and sustainability goals. As a benchmark, we set the goal of SKA Gold accreditation - the highest sustainability award specifically designed for fit-outs.

Attention was also paid to the impacts of vacating our previous offices. The target was zero to landfill, with the added challenge of delivering social value. In our former home, we had grown organically, expanding into adjacent units and acquiring furniture in batches leading to an environment that lacked consistency and cohesion. We had sweated our assets - some of our furniture had been in the company for its entire 25 year history - and we didn't want to fill a newly refurbished space with elderly and mismatched furniture. Our IT equipment, in particular, had been retained beyond its optimum life to avoid replacing it before the impending move. Much of this was deemed beyond economic use, although a number of monitors were donated to the local Freegle branch to be sold to raise funds to sustain itself. The rest was sent for recycling in line with WEEE regulations through Return on IT, an asset disposal company that prioritises re-use over recycling and provides a social benefit. As a result, our unwanted computer equipment raised £520 for Action for Children, a charity that tackles youth homelessness.

Our furniture, although aged, was in relatively good condition and was offered to local charities with the support of ActiveFM, our relocation providers, who delivered it free of charge. You can read more about this in our social contribution section. The remaining items were Freegled, and having started by offering small items like lever arch files and filing trays we quickly realised that we could also re-home larger items this way. Even our reception desk was Freegled and we were pleased to note that many of our items went to benefit start-ups and micro businesses.

Because we moved premises, our carbon emissions trendline was broken and we are not currently reporting the emissions from our UK headquarters. Once we have been 12 months in our new offices we will establish a baseline and set a target for ongoing emissions reduction. This will be a challenge, as the new building is extremely energy efficient - as evidenced by the fact that the SKA Gold accreditation was, indeed, achieved. Eldon Court was only the 31st property to receive the SKA Gold award, out of 593 properties to have registered with the scheme thus far.